The promise of painting, especially abstract painting, has to do with its ability to take us into various models of the world. Each painter attempts to delineate a specific perspective on how matter is organized, how space is allotted, how color and light, depth and viscosity work to establish standards for understanding how the universe affects us. Each of the artists participating in “Some (Are) Painting” has achieved a level of mature investigation into such matters. Peggy Bates samples the constancy and depth of movement in natural bodies of water, manifesting how interior or elemental vibrations meet the specificity of mark-making; Barbara Campisi uses a landscaper’s tool to create spirit lines, not on a segment of physical territory, but on white boards and sheets of vellum, creating chromatically dynamic intervals with the syntactical quality of a musical caesura; Sean Greene mines the awkwardness and inherent frustration of youth to take gestures out of subversive activities such as graffiti tagging and skateboarding and gives them the mellifluous quality of calligraphy; Halsey Hathaway draws the vestigial space of the body into the void of the visual perception and esthetic space; Madeleine Hatz finds in real world materials such as oil, gold, brick, and the green dyes of dollar bills, creating heavy and allegorically overwhelmed abstract folds that reflect the chaos of contemporary society as well as its inherently obscure economic reality; these artists and the others whose works fill out this exhibition all succeed in manifesting a reality which accrues while it adds both truth and beauty to the already known, making the sensible fantastic and the useful a dream on its own terms.

In the middle of the journey of our lifeI found myself astray in a dark woodwhere the straight road had been lost sight of.How hard it is to say what it was likein the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense and gnarledthe very thought of it renews my panic.It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.But to rehearse the good it also brought meI will speak about the other things I saw there.--The Inferno by Dante Aligheri

Uncertainty is the measure of engagement that people who grapple with the struggles of life undergo. The feeling of being trapped in difficulties, our strength lessened by limits imposed. Yet uncertainty can also make us question what matters, and those questions emerge as expression…